


Whim

by pseudocitrus



Category: Tokyo Ghoul
Genre: Angst, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Mild Smut, Some Hidekane, Some Touken
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-19
Updated: 2015-07-09
Packaged: 2018-03-18 15:36:28
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,336
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3574775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pseudocitrus/pseuds/pseudocitrus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the ruins of the Anteiku raid, Touka searches for Kaneki, and finds someone else that she knows is precious to him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i just, i just ship Touka with everyone :') :') :')
> 
> this also contains references to amputation, and the ghouls-eat-humans thing, and some Touken/Hidekane.
> 
> hope you're having a good day; enjoy!

Against Yomo’s wishes, Touka goes rummaging through the wreckage of the Anteiku battle, looking for Irimi or Koma or Yoshimura or Kaneki or anyone else. It’s no use. The whole place is picked clean as if by vultures, and she loses hope of finding anyone.

Then she smells something strangely, sickly sweet.

She follows it and finds someone in the sewer muck, sans some fingers and one leg beneath the knee. He’s almost dead, but she recognizes him, and hauls him up, and manages somehow to get him into the new apartment she and Yomo share, much to his frustration.

“He’s a _Dove._ ”

“He’s Kaneki’s _friend_.”

And possibly the last part of Kaneki that she has left.

Touka binds off his wounds the same way she did when she and Ayato got wounded in their youth. She struggles through reading online articles about what medicines to get and what foods to make to help him get well.

:::

It takes time, but Hide recovers. He opens his eyes blearily and with some panic searches for Kaneki. The last thing he remembers is the stench of the sewer, and the incredible agony of Kaneki’s teeth — but now he’s alone, and in some kind of…apartment? It doesn’t even look like the CCG headquarters.

And then someone opens the door.

“Oh,” he says. His voice is hoarse; he clears his throat. “So…so it’s the cute waitress.”

She almost drops the bowl of rice porridge.

For some time they stare at each other. He can tell that she’s nervous about him now that he’s awake, and he tries to push himself up into a sitting position, and realizes only then that one of his hands is bandaged up. He looks at it, and then at her.

“Thank you,” he says, and she relaxes, as evident by her slightly slackened frown.

“…Yeah.”

She enters the room and sets the bowl on his lap. He tries to reach for the spoon, and begins to shake and sweat, and she tells him to quit and feeds him herself, spooning broth gingerly into his clumsy mouth. She explains that he’s been up a few times already, but hasn’t been this lucid. When the bowl is empty she asks if he wants tea, and he says yes, but he falls asleep again before she comes back.

:::

From there, progression remains slow but becomes more visible. His fevers cool; he stops gasping Kaneki’s name in his sleep. He progresses to solid foods, and asks for books and water, and Touka gives him a stack and a pitcher, respectively. What he doesn’t ask for is a phone, and Touka and Yomo keep theirs carefully hidden.

“He’s a _Dove,_ ” Yomo hisses again one day, and Touka looks down.

“Maybe he hasn’t figured it out.”

“It’s okay,” Hide says. “I know.”

He’s standing, clutching the doorframe to keep himself standing. Yomo shoves Touka behind himself protectively, and Touka huffs, and Hide makes a light laugh.

“It’s okay. Who cares about little details like that?”

They stare, with identical skepticism.

“I didn’t mind that Kaneki was either,” Hide adds, with surprising lightheartedness.

“He told you?” Touka demands.

“No.”

Touka and Yomo exchange glances.

“Get back in bed,” Touka tells him, and Hide obeys, and she goes to see him hours later, in the middle of the night. She sits at his bedside, fingers worrying a keychain in her lap. Hide waits.

“Did you see what happened to him?” she asks finally, and Hide says, “No.”

He explains what he did see, though, and the last thing he remembers. Touka’s pained look as he relates his story makes him want to reach out and embrace her, but he stays put.

There’s a silence. Then she says, “Yo… _Nii-san_ doesn’t want me to let you leave.”

“O-oh,” Hide says. Some panicked animal brain inside his skull screams _They’re going to eat you,_ but he suppresses it and makes himself see the facts: her pursed lips, her furrowed brows. After years of reading Kaneki, Touka is easy. Her eyes fall on his left leg, on the place beneath his knee where the blankets rest flat. She sighs, with frustration. She leaves and comes back with a walking stick, and he limps all the way back to CCG headquarters.

:::

Hide is surprised to learn that he’s one of the only once-missing-now-found investigators from the raid. Though he’s apprehensive about it, Touka’s messy healing of him turns out to be an advantage; he succeeds in convincing his superiors that he somehow managed to heal himself.

They give him some kind of test, the results of which are negative, which disappoints the higher-ups for reasons that are apparently above his pay grade. After that, they outfit Hide with a prosthetic that Suzuya teaches him how to maneuver, though Hide’s has a few less knives.

He searches surreptitiously through the CCG files but can’t find anything about Kaneki at all. It seems in the aftermath of the raid, no one cares about finding him, and without Kaneki out there _somewhere_ , Hide’s motivation flags. People had high hopes for him as a raid veteran, but soon enough he gets shuffled aside into a simple desk role.

:::

A month passes before Yomo calms down enough to speak to Touka again, and even when all signs suggest that Hide won’t sell them out, he remains suspicious.

Several more months pass before she can convince him to start a new cafe, despite the fact that it’s obvious he wants to. Without something to do, his temper gets off balance. And both of them are too lonely, especially Touka, now that her friendship with Yoriko and her dreams of attending college have been thrown out with her old identity. Even Hinami is gone. All she has left are uneasy dreams, and dark spots beneath her eyes.

:::

The cafe starts as barely anything more than a hole in the wall that can seat about three customers. It’s running for the good part of a year when someone comes in and stops and stares at her.

“Oh,” he says, scratching his cheek. “Hello.”

It’s Hide.

They survey each other silently. He’s standing straighter and looks stable, if gaunt. Touka sees him taking in her lighter hair. He takes the nearest seat and requests a cappuccino, which Touka wordlessly brings him.

He comes back the next day, and the next.

On the fourth day he says, “Hey. You don’t have a boyfriend, do you?”

She looks away. “I don’t,” she admits.

“Then, do you want to go on a date?”

She glances back at the counter. Yomo is absent; he’s in the back somewhere.

“I’ll be free at six,” she says.

:::

They meet, at a different cafe, in a different ward. They nurse their drinks and chat about the weather and then go home and meet again at the same cafe the next week. This time, Hide has enough courage to break the ice.

“Tell me about him,” he says. “Tell me what he was like at Anteiku.”

And Touka takes a deep breath, and she tells him, everything — how bad he was at making coffee, but how he got better — how he covered for her mistakes — how they’d fought Tsukiyama at the chapel. She even tells him about their sneaking into the CCG, and their fight against Hinami’s murderer — who cares anyway if he knows — what does she have left to lose?

“Your turn,” she says, next. And Hide takes a deep breath, and tells her, everything — what a lonely kid he was, how he cherished books like pets — how they spent so many nights at the playground looking up at the stars — how he aced all his tests and threw them away. He even tells her details about his time in the CCG, and the minutia of their hierarchy, how he searched every record he could access and petitioned Arima Kishou himself to see the highly classified ones, in vain. Who cares anyway if she knows — what does he have left to lose?

They pass their stories between them, telling and listening with equal parts secrecy and urgency, with a hunger whose pangs they both, impossibly, share, despite being a human and a ghoul. No one else has been able to provide the same, simple comfort of being heard and being soothed. It takes two more days to exhaust every detail and reaction, and another day to pick over it all again, like dogs, sucking out the marrow and comforting themselves with splinters and gristle.

After that, though they are hungrier than ever, there is nothing left, nothing, nothing. The void before them both — the void of a world without any more stories of Kaneki to tell or make — yawns open, and threatens to swallow them whole.

“You loved him,” Hide says finally, and Touka looks up at the ceiling, blinking rapidly.

“Maybe,” she allows, and Hide laughs his first genuine laugh since being literally dragged up out of a sewer.

“He must have left you behind because he loved you too,” he says, and Touka snaps, “Yeah, right. What kind of a person abandons you when they lo — feel that way about you?”

Hide’s gaze slides away, and she regrets her outburst immediately. She wasn’t the only one left behind, after all.

“I’m sure he felt _that way_ about you,” Touka mumbles, with incredible effort, and Hide makes a smile that doesn’t reach his downcast eyes.

“Maybe.”

They sit in pained quiet. His hand, the one with false fingers, is resting on the counter, and after gritting her teeth Touka reaches and rests her own hand on it. Her grip is somewhat stiff, and she pulls away again after a breath, but Hide’s smile turns into an authentic one, and the silence relaxes.

:::

They part.

There are no more stories to tell, and they both understand now that there’s no more reason to talk with each other, much less spend time together at all. So, Hide is surprised and relieved when he comes by the usual place at the usual time, and sees Touka there. She has her espresso, and as well as his cappuccino, perched at empty seat beside her. He sits, and says, cheerfully, “Thanks.”

“Mmm,” Touka replies.

There isn’t much left to say about the past, so he clears his throat and asks about her day, and describes his own when she asks back.

They have the same answers: everything is just alright. Boring. But better than usual.

He asks her then for details regarding her plans for a larger cafe, and she ventures into some, and makes notes of his suggestions for a name that alludes to recovery, or restoration, or things happening again.

“Won’t that be too obvious?”

“Hopefully just to the right people.”

“I don’t know. Besides, I don’t know that I want things to happen _exactly_ the way they did before,” she mutters.

“Yeah,” Hide sighs. He thinks, and then says, “You should add bookshelves.”

“Yeah, I already had that idea. But it would strain the budget.”

“Oh, don’t worry about that, I’ve got some books I could give you. Those ones that he recommended to me.”

“R-really? Are you sure?”

“Of course! They’ll be put to better use that way.”

They draw out ideal blueprints on a napkin, which Touka folds and tucks carefully into her her pocket when their cups are empty. They stand, and set their mugs in the bus tray, and Hide asks if she’d like him to walk her home, and she says no, and suggests they take a look at those books instead.

He hesitates only a little before admitting they’re in his apartment, and Touka hesitates only a little before admitting that that’s fine.

:::

No one else has been able to provide the same, simple comfort of being heard and being soothed. They both remove their shoes in the entryway, and walk in, and Hide says that the books Kaneki recommended to him are all stacked on a table by his bed. It’s only partially true, and she nods, avoiding looking at the column of novels on his kotatsu.

Hide goes into his bedroom to retrieve the books, and isn’t surprised when Touka follows him in.

:::

It’s…tough.

“Um…do you…want to sit? Because of your leg?”

“No…not really.”

“…alright.”

She looks away, and Hide reaches forward, setting his hands around her waist. Though his contact is light, he can feel her tremble.

“You’ve never done it before?”

“…no.”

“Haha, it’s alright. Me neither.”

She frowns at him.

“It’s true! I really haven’t. So tell me if…if it feels bad. Alright?”

Her frown deepens. “You tell me too,” she mutters, and he laughs.

“Okay.”

Touka is definitely his type — or at least would have been, before he knew how somber and quick-tempered she was beneath the whole “cute waitress” thing going on. They’ve interacted only sporadically, but it’s enough to change everything. He kisses her forehead and she leans against him and as he kisses her throat he thinks, _This is for you_.

For Kaneki, who might have wanted to do this and never broke his chains to do it. For Touka, and the loneliness sprawling and grasping out of her every motion like vines an untended garden. And for himself, and the trembling core of him that is exhausted of searching and running, and wants so badly just to feel a little warmth.

:::

It’s tough, at first.

Nagachika Hideyoshi is both a stranger and someone whom she understands more completely than anyone else.

But she is hungrier than ever and this single, small, morsel in this void is not something she can keep herself from indulging. Though she feels clumsy, the sound Hide makes when she lays a kiss on the crook of his chin and throat gives her courage, and gall. She’s seen his body already, the night that she peeled him out of his sewage-covered Dove uniform, but there’s something vastly different about it now. His skin feels hotter than it did during his worst fevers, and the heat infects. Their loneliness sparks a fire greater than either of them had anticipated, and soon they’re pushing themselves away from each other, and ripping off their clothes, and clenching each other again, desperate, desperate.

Hide rubs his hands on her hips and guides her to his bed, on her knees.

“Is — is it okay if I —”

“Y-yeah, just do it, just do it, _do it_ —”

He positions, thrusts. Touka cries out and pushes her ass further up even as she buries her forehead against the mattress, biting his blankets and moaning into them.

It happens fast, too fast, the first day — and the second, and the third. By the fourth their desperation has slowed into something more similar to normal lust, and they feel, for the first time, more similar to normal people.

A week later Hide kisses Touka’s mouth, and she kisses back. For the first time, she stays afterward. They sprawl out across his bed, and together they read a couple books — different ones, new ones that they picked up at the store just because they felt like it.


	2. Epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Touka shows Hide her kagune.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> written for an anon prompt on tumblr.
> 
> hope you're having a good day!

Sometimes when she turns her head, Hide will wince — or look away — or stare back at her, with a smile a little wider than usual, and with just a little more tooth.

It’s so faint, so fleeting. Someone not dedicated to the necessary art of human behavior might not have noticed anything off at all. To Touka, it is obvious, but it’s only when she’s in his apartment one night that she finally understands.

She stands in front of his sink, and watches his reflection in the window. He’s sitting on a futon, which is currently folded up into a couch. Sure enough, after a couple seconds, his gaze rises, and fixes.

On her back.

“You’re curious about it,” she says, without turning, and Hide jumps.

“H-huh?”

“My kagune,” she says. “You’re curious.”

That too-broad smile again. He scratches his cheek. He looks like he’s going to lie, and then he shuts his mouth, and opens it to release a sigh.

“Yeeaah,” he admits. He laughs lightly, like it’s a joke, and Touka walks back toward him.

Hide doesn’t question the days that she doesn’t spend at his apartment, and in turn, she doesn’t let him know in advance when she’ll be…doing her own thing. Even though she knows that he knows what she is, it’s not something that she’s entirely willing to confront him with, lest the light that shines when he looks at her be burned out.

“You don’t need to,” he says, and Touka replies, “I probably should.”

If he’s going to go, it might as well be sooner rather than later.

He straightens up as she nears, and Touka sits on his lap, folding one leg and then the other onto either side of him. She wants to feel if his pulse quickens too much, wants to see if his pupils become tiny, wants to interpret his exact expression.

“It uses up Rc cells,” she says. “And I don’t want to…eat…sooner than I need to. So…”

“Yeah,” he says quickly. “Of course. That’s fine.”

He holds up his hand, and Touka cradles it in hers, folding back his fingers. She closes her eyes and presses her face into it, feeling the warm creases of his palm against her cheeks, and then lays a kiss into it that is punctuated with a pinch of teeth.

Hide takes a slow breath in, and then out. Her tongue laves once, twice — she sips, sucks — and then she draws herself up and curls his fingers up, indicating that he keep pressure on it. When she opens her eyes to look at him, she searches his expression for horror at her black-and-scarlet gaze.

But he doesn’t so much as swallow. He doesn’t even look flustered until she hooks her fingers beneath the edges of her shirt and inverts it over her head, and she snorts.

“You’ve seen  _this_  already.”

“W-well, sure. But it’s always nice to see it again.” His unwounded hand reaches behind her, stroking her lower back, and Touka shakes her head.

“Ukaku,” she says, and Hide’s hand rises and caresses her shoulder blade. The instant he does, Touka emits them, gently. A spark. A smolder. Oranges limned in cerise and obsidian and pink. She turns and watches as he lets his hand bathe in the free-flowing cells. Like a child scratching an itch in the mouth of a dog.

Hide is so bright sometimes that she almost wants to see him recoil, just to know it’s possible, and she makes her kagune flare out with a _whuff_  that succeeds in making him flinch. But then he just laughs.

“Neat,” he remarks.

This was not on the list of reactions she was expecting.

“ _Neat_?” she echoes with a frown. Hide rubs her shoulder vigorously, until her kagune retract.

“Yeah,” he says. “They’re pretty cool.”

Touka’s brows furrow. She grits her teeth, and then makes herself speak. Her voice is puckered with discomfort.

“I mean…don’t you think that they’re…a little beautiful?”

“Oh,” Hide says. “Well, sure, yeah, they’re really nice. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m glad you showed me. I guess, after seeing them, I can just confirm I’m not really a kagune guy.”

A kagune guy.

“What,” Touka asks, “the  _hell_  does that mean,” and Hide laughs.

“I mean, I guess, your whole body is great, but I’m just a bigger fan of certain parts of it.” When Touka stares, his hand drifts downward indicatively, and the finger he traces down her spine and lower dissipates her irritation and quickly replaces it with something else.

Afterward, when Hide is sleeping, Touka scratches lightly over the curves of his bare, human back, and she watches as he shifts and wrinkles his nose and sighs without waking. She waits, and then presses her lips, lightly, between his shoulder blades.

Somehow, she’s never felt more normal.


End file.
